Google controls over 90 percent of the search market, with 63 percent coming from its traditional search textbox and 23 percent coming from Google image search, according to VisualCapitalist.com.

As popular as Google's search bar is, it's only one of the ways people use it to search for information. Pretty early in its road to dominance, the company realized search would take many forms. So it added image search and later acquired YouTube, the nexus of consumer-generated media.

In contrast, Microsoft's Bing—Google's only real direct search portal rival—accounts for only 2 percent of search volume. That's even lower than Yahoo, which had to sell out to Verizon. And while Facebook may be a formidable rival to Google in terms of ad revenue share, it's barely a blip when it comes to search.

Of more interest, though, is Amazon. While it, too, accounts for less than 3 percent of search volume, virtually all of that is for products. That does not sit well with Google, which hasn't had much success with its Google Express shopping portal intended to compete with Amazon Prime.

Instead, it's bringing the fight to the voice agent space, moving aggressively with Google Assistant in an attempt to prevent Amazon from grabbing too much market share in voice-driven commerce. More importantly for Google, it uses the data collected by such devices to help it get a picture of consumer behavior.

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